A fantastic stingray

I haven’t done many night dives. It isn’t because I am daunted by the prospect I just haven’t had the opportunity. There were only two night dives that took place while I did my divemaster course and I was too tired to even contemplate doing them. My last night dive was back in February when I was in Marsa Alam and that was an exciting dive for many reasons.

Stuart Cove’s have recently started doing night dives every Friday evening. I believe this is due to a deal they have made with the Sheraton Hotel (don’t quote me on that). They are more expensive than the cost of a two-tank dive and you only get one dive so I haven’t felt the urge to do one, but with Brad being here it made sense to give it a go. He has never done one and we thought that we may as well do our first night dive in the Bahamas together, as it will also be his last opportunity to dive on this trip.

We had to be at Stuart Cove’s for 6pm. So I left work as soon as it finished and headed to my apartment to pick up Brad. A quick change of clothes, a check of kit, and we were on our way. We arrived at Stuart Cove around 5pm, checked in, and set up our kit. We had to wait for some late arrivals, and once they were set up we were about to depart when Alex, a member of the Bahamas Dive Club, managed to make a last minute appearance and jumped on just before we pulled away.
Excitement was in the air and Brad was giddy like a school boy.

We were soon heading out to the Twin Sisters. As it was Brad’s first night dive he was pleased that he could do it on a dive that he had done before.  We moored up over the shallower of the two wrecks (however this turned out to be wrong as we were moored over the deeper of the two wrecks), our dive leader started his briefing. As we were part of the dive club we were able to skip this and jump in before everyone else. We descended without the line and found that we were on the deeper of the two wrecks. Not a problem, I remembered how they were laid out and we started swimming around. To be honest there wasn’t that much life on the wrecks. Coral hasn’t taken a strong hold on the boats as yet so looking for life was tough. However, we did find arrowhead crabs, lionfish, stingrays, squirrel fish and many other animals to keep us occupied. As we passed between the boats we came across a turtle. It was a beautiful sight watching him swim in the water but it was quite obvious that he was becoming distressed, there were too many of the divers shining lights onto him. It was a little upsetting.

We bimbled around some more and unfortunately Brad was running a little low on air, so he joined two of the other divers as the ascended to do their safety stop. I joined up with Jan and Alex, they were filming using Jan’s GoPro. We stayed another 10 minutes before we headed back up to the surface.

It was a great dive. I really enjoyed it. I was surprised at how comfortable that I felt on the night dive. I think that it is something that I will have to do again, and soon.

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